Secretive Space Vehicle Tested at Private Texas Site

A flight test of the prototype "Goddard" vehicle at Blue Origin's launch site in West Texas.

Credit: Blue Origin

That secretive rocket work being
bankrolled by billionaire Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com fame has shed some new light
on its activities.

Blue Origin is developing New
Shepard, a rocket-propelled
vehicle that takes
off and lands vertically and is designed to routinely fly multiple
astronauts into suborbital space at competitive prices. ?

Blue Origin is now noting that, in
addition to providing the public with opportunities to experience spaceflight,
New Shepard will also provide frequent opportunities for researchers to fly
experiments into space and a microgravity environment.

To help shape this activity, the
group has announced that interested parties should contact Blue Origin's
independent representative for research and education missions, Alan Stern, the
former
NASA chief of space science.

These research and education
missions are dubbed REM, oriented toward microgravity and space science
investigations.

This activity would be in addition
to, not in place of, Blue Origin's long-standing plans for human-carrying
commercial flights. The first opportunities for autonomous or remotely
controlled experiments on unpiloted flights could be as early as 2011 and the
first ones requiring accompanying research astronauts would be available as
early as 2012.

Coasting into space

In a mission overview, Blue Origin explains that the New
Shepard vehicle will consist of a pressurized Crew Capsule (CC) carrying
experiments and astronauts atop a Propulsion Module (PM).

Flights will take place from Blue
Origin's own launch site, which is already operating in West Texas. New Shepard
will take-off vertically and accelerate for approximately two and a half
minutes before shutting off its rocket engines and coasting into space.

The vehicle will carry rocket motors
enabling the Crew Capsule to escape from the PM in the event of a serious
anomaly during launch. In space, the Crew Capsule will separate from the PM and
the two will reenter and land separately for re-use.

The Crew Capsule will land softly
under a parachute at the launch site. Astronauts and experiments will experience
no more than a 6g acceleration and a 1.5g lateral acceleration during a typical
flight. High-quality microgravity environments will be achieved for durations
of three or more minutes, depending on the mission trajectory.

Call for investigators

Blue Origin is soliciting input from
investigators to help design research astronaut and experiment accommodations.
Researchers will have the opportunity to provide their own racks to mount into
the vehicle (subject to a safety review), or use standard racks and services to
mount their experiments.

Flight experiments may be
autonomous, remotely operated, or operated manually by an accompanying
researcher provided by the customer or by Blue Origin.

As for a timeline, Blue Origin notes
that flight testing of prototype New Shepard vehicles began in 2006. The group expects
the first opportunities for experiments requiring an accompanying researcher
astronaut to be available in 2012. Flight opportunities in 2011 may be
available for autonomous or remotely-controlled experiments on an unpiloted flight
test.

Experiment listing

Preliminary accommodations and
standard services Blue Origin anticipates will be available include:

Capacity  three
or more positions to be used by astronauts or experiment racks

As for the kinds of experiments that
could be flown, Blue Origin's website lists remote sensing, such as atmospheric
science and Earth observations, sampling of the atmosphere and magnetospheric
measurements. In-cabin science investigations are listed too, including
physiology, gravitational biology or microgravity physics research.

Still under study is possible
launching of deployable payloads from the New Shepard.

NASA interest

Blue Origin's interest in suborbital
science, like other rocket firms, is being stoked by NASA creating a program
office to explore this arena at the space agency's Ames Research Center.

That office is investigating the use
of emerging commercial suborbital vehicles for scientific research, including,
but not limited to, flights to space of researchers to allow for human-tended
experiments.

By the way, a Human-Tended
Suborbital Science Workshop is on tap next week at the Westin San Francisco
Market Street. That Dec. 15 workshop is being held in conjunction with the
American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting and is sponsored by the Universities
Space Research Association.

Leonard
David has been reporting on the space industry for more than four decades. He
is past editor-in-chief of the National Space Society's Ad Astra and Space
World magazines and has written for SPACE.com since 1999.